Hello and thank you again for joining our K-12 tech podcast. My name is Sean. I’m your host, along with my co-host Mike. And today we are joined by Allie Slow felt she is part of the Mishawaka School System in Indiana. We’re going to be discussing A.I. and chat like no one else is talking about it yet. But how it can actually be integrated into the curriculum for a student to use or a teacher to use versus how it can affect the school as a whole. So we’ll give you some time to introduce yourself and we’ll get the conversation going.
Great. I am Ali Schlotfeldt. Like Sean said, I am with the school city of Mishawaka and Mishawaka, Indiana. It’s where Notre Dame is. That’s our claim to fame. I started as a high school English teacher. I went back to school and got my ESL license as a first-year teacher. So I have that little superpower. About five years into the classroom, I decided to leave the classroom and become a technology coach back home in South Bend, where then I kind of took on a leadership position and then moved over to the curriculum department where I got my master’s in curriculum and instruction and so now I am a curriculum integration specialist, so I help teachers utilize the curriculum and the technology. I get to wear both hats, which I really enjoy. If no I.T. background, I’m literally just an educator who likes technology and have learned different stuff along the way, and that is me.
And I think that brings an interesting perspective from you then, because you were in the classroom, you did a lot with students, and now you’re helping teachers that maybe, you know, it is difficult to design your own curriculum as a new teacher, especially, you know, just kind of trying to figure it out as you go. And as we all know, it changes every single day inside of school.
So you can have something planned out for a week and it just doesn’t go that way. So I think it’s a great perspective you have and it’s also great that you love technology because bring it into the topic that we’re going to talk about today, how obviously COVID has affected technology in the classroom because it had to take technology out of the classrooms so the classroom could essentially come home with the student. But, you know, we’ve all figured that out. Chromebooks are the answer. Send them home with the kids, student or teacher. Just post everything online. And it’s that online classroom mentality. Now that we’re all back, there are other aspects of technology that have made their ways in the schools, and I’m interested to hear how you can incorporate that tech into the classroom.
Yeah, so I think the biggest part is the blending of technology in the classrooms. Now, I think post-COVID, many people wanted to just say, no more technology. We’ve had it. We’re coming back to on-paper pencil again, and that’s not beneficial. I think we have to find that blend of one. Is it good to put away the devices and one, is it good to use them? How does it enhance it? And there’s so many tools out there that enhance that learning that can break down the walls of our classroom. One of those being chat app or like this, this realm of generative A.I. that’s coming in. I just learned about a different one yesterday, and I’ve been diving into this one called Copilot as well.
So just really cool stuff out there that just allows us to save time, work smarter, not harder, helps our students work smarter, not harder, and allows us as a teacher to be in multiple places at one time.
So from a curriculum point of view, then how so? Let’s say I’m in the classroom, I’m teaching high school science, which is something I remember, and that is what I used to do. So it’s the only thing I’m familiar with. How would I use A.I. or chat, CBT, or any of these platforms to actually build curriculum or come up with ideas for students to do? I mean, how I guess I, I don’t know anything about it. I’ve never played around with any of those tools. So how would I use it for my classroom?
Perfect. So we’ll start with the teacher aspect of it because there is also like this huge student aspect of it. So teachers, again, we’re going to work smarter, not harder. I can get on chat GPG and put in standards or learning objectives and ask for a lesson plan. I can say I am a sixth-grade social studies teacher and I need to teach this standard and I want it to be two days long and whatever else you have to tell it what you want. You want to be as precise as possible and concise as well, and it’s going to give you the lesson plan. It’s going to give you learning objectives. It’s going to give you all I need an argumentative essay on the branches of government, and it’s going to pop that out and you can use it as your authentic text in your classroom rather than sitting in there and Googling or trying to find that you’re saving so much time because it’s going to take it less than a minute to write you an essay.
It’s going to take less than a minute to create a rubric for you. It’s going to take less than a minute to write you that recommendation letter for your high school students that want to go to college right now. It’s just going to do it for you. And by all means, it needs a second eye. It needs it’s going to need some editing, but it’s saving you so much time.
Oh, yeah. I don’t know if it’s the old teacher in me, but that sounds like cheating. I mean, I don’t it because it sounds like cheating. I know when we had training lesson plans, we had to show where these objectives were being met, especially in college. Not so much in practice in the real world, but how it was, how it was meeting those objectives, blah, blah, blah. If I have to hear that word one more time. So how is that? I mean, how is it not cheating, I guess?
Yeah, it definitely can be. I mean, I was in a meeting yesterday and they this curriculum provider was saying, look at all these great questions that we have. And I said, click, click, click in the chat and out came the argumentative essay that they were asking their students to write. And I was like, Hey, Chad, you can just do this. It’s not asking anything outside the box. It’s not asking anything on Google. So we have to one, we have to build we have to build relationships with our students as a high school English teacher, I knew my students writing and that should be across content areas. You’re as a science teacher, as a social studies teacher, you should be able to know your students writing and be able to know if it’s plagiarism, chat, JP, etc. that they’re not going to use words that GPT is going to use at the sixth-grade level probably.
So you’ll know that there are also tools already coming out that are a AI, plagiarism tools. I know one of our platforms all already has it built in one of our monitoring platforms. Crazy that it’s this fast that they can already do it. The second thing or the third thing, whatever number I’m on is, is that we have to focus on analyzing and opinions. Chad, Djibouti is not good with opinions. It’s not going to tell you an opinion. We have to like to analyze and make things relevant to today. It’s also a year behind. So if you keep things current and relevant, it’s not going to know those answers either. So it kind of pushes the needle to kind of what I think Google try to do however many years ago and get us to be more authentic with our activities, our assessments, etc. But it is going to happen. So you got to know your kids.
With Egypt or any of the other platforms that you upload information into. Are we getting to the point yet where teachers can use that like will it grade papers or is it only on the generation side yet? Not really. The analyzing side it can.
So this is one of my favorite ways to use it that I have heard of and that I kind of show is I can take a student’s essay or a writing example and I can say, Hey, I want feedback on this essay and I want you to use this rubric and it’s going to do it for me. That is not going to be how I agree. The essay. I’m going to look at it myself, but it allows the students to do that and get one eye on it or a pair of eyes on it before I get it. So they can make all those revisions that I don’t have the time for and it’s going to do it for them. So I’m going to use it.
I’m going to put in that student example. I’m going to let it give that feedback and grade it, and then we’re going to have a class discussion about it and be like, This is the things that we need to revise as a whole class before I see it.
So it’s essentially like having your paper reviewed by a peer and then going through and highlighting whatever areas where they think might need fixing. But it’s just an air doing it instead.
Exactly. It’s just an extra set. And I would still have the peer do it too, because there’s definitely skills being built there as well with the collaboration and giving critical feedback to each other.
Let’s say I’m teaching about evolution. Okay. And that’s our section in bio that we’re in. Is there a way for me to go into one of these platforms and ask for recommendations on books? I mean, obviously, the big thing in schools right now is across curriculum, right? So you wanted to have reading in every classroom in math and science and somehow incorporate all these things together, which sometimes is difficult, but with these tools now is that something where it’ll make recommendations of, well, these match the standards or whatever that you put in, so try these books.
I think so. I’ve never done that. That’s a good question. But I really like that idea I have. I’ve asked it to like to write me like Ben and Jerry’s. So yes, it’s not evolution, but it was just something fun. So evolution I can say create me a text or, you know, this authentic piece or can you provide me some books? I don’t know. I’ve never done that one. I like that idea, though. I think that’s beneficial, especially if it can give you like the links or I would be interested to know how to access those books. Then that would be cool if you could give me the links to those resources because that’s one thing that it does. It does give you the work site and page or, you know, your sources.
But that’s a huge other debate, right, is who do we cite when we use strategy D? I don’t know the answer to that yet.
Right. Yeah. And I mean, if it’s pulling from the Internet, which is millions, I mean, it’s endless sources, right? I mean, that’s it’s like going to Wikipedia, you know, which everyone told us we couldn’t use because whatever. But when you go to that all the way down to the bottom, there’s like 300 sources that it pulled that information from on a very small page about like, you know, rainbows and it pulled from 300 different sources. So I guess my question is, and again, never use any of these platforms. Are you asking it questions or are you telling it? Here is the information I’m giving you. Make something.
Okay. So I just did it. Like I literally have chat jpt on my other screen. And so I said all I typed in was booklist about evolution for grade six. And it says, here are some book recommendations about evolution that would be suitable for sixth-grade students. And it is currently listing it’s on number five. And so it says like the magic school bus inside the human body. And it’s like this is not focused on evolution, but it provides an introduction and basic concepts. So not only does it give you a book list, it tells you in a sentence or two if that what that books about. And it gave me seven, seven books. So, yes, you can ask questions. Yes, you can give statements. You may have to continue the conversation with it.
It may have told me it may have asked me something different and giving me a completely wrong answer. And that just simply means that my prompt is not concise enough. This is another huge thing with it is how we’re writing our prompts. And that’s another great skill for our students to learn. And for us we have to figure out how to write these prompts. I just wrote an article that like a 28 year old that’s her job, is a prompt engineer. And I was like, I do not train my high school kids for a to be a prompt engineer when I was a teacher in the classroom. So what are we training our kids to do now that we don’t even know exist yet?
Right. And it is it’s funny. It is funny in weird to hear you say like, yeah, you have to continue the conversation with it because it means it’s a computer. We just cut people crazy for doing that. But it is that is cool that at least. So yeah, there’s always jobs opening up, right? Who would have known at some point that we were going to have to train people on how to how to have a computer-recognized prompts that that’s just bizarre but you know technology moves in essentially one direction and so it’s always it’s non-stop.
You have to learn how to read to learn how to talk to Google, too.
So and that’s where when my students would ask like, oh, they just raise their hand and ask me the question when they’re on a computer in front of them. And I would say, well, just type exactly what you just asked me into the Google search bar and it will tell you a hundred different things to look at when I just am one person. So Google it. So that’s that’s where I think that’s where this technology is can be used for good. Right. And that’s especially from the from the teacher standpoint, the educator standpoint. How are the students going to be able to use that in the classroom and not just have all of their papers written for them? But you mentioned already like a can check or peer review, a paper for student.
How else like what else can the kid do on these platforms?
So one of my favorite and this kind of combines that to one of my favorite ways that teachers have been using this is in the elementary classroom where we know the strategy of three before me. And so ask three of your peers or check a book before you come ask me. It allows the teacher to be up and around. The new version is three before me and one has to be chat. GPP So students write wild and so students can use chat GPP to ask questions that opens the teacher up to be doing. Small groups are working one on one with students or conferencing and things like that and chat can help them. It it’s crazy. I have an engineering teacher in a nearby district who his engineering students asked Chad GPT to help problem solve on the different platforms on Arduino or when they’re programing Raspberry Pi, they type in their questions to Chad GP and it comes out with the problem solving.
So the teacher is then able to be helping other students or working with another group and students are able to problem-solve. Another way is that it can give them a baseline. I mean this is another huge way to do research rather than googling, which definitely has its benefits, it definitely has its research skills that need to be built. However, chat can also provide them a baseline of whatever they’re researching. There’s so many different ways. There’s one out there about historical figures. It’s a different app and it’s like it’s called Hello History and students can literally have conversations with dead or alive historical figures. I can learn all about Benjamin Franklin by having a conversation with chat by Benjamin Franklin and it’s wild.
Like it just opened up the door for so many things as long as we teach students how to use it correctly.
Yeah. And I think so that is that is pretty cool. And there’s a few conferences I’ve been to where obviously everyone’s bringing their newest technology and a lot of it’s centered for classroom. Some of it can be used in classrooms, but isn’t necessarily for classroom. But the one that I found that was really cool was a a VR like dissection experience where students that may not have access to physical specimens in the classroom or because they’re not cheap and not all schools are funded well, but they can get on VR and actually manipulate things.
So that is really cool that you can talk to, you know, someone that is no longer alive and essentially ask them questions about themselves and in response. So if I understand correctly too, there are video or I guess video generating platforms, there’s audio generating platforms and then there’s text generating platforms, is that correct? Yep.
An image, unless you consider that under that video.
Are there any of that? All of them?
I have not seen it yet. That would be interesting.
Okay. Yeah, I just again, I’m not familiar with that.
Yeah, I know you’re and I am. I mean, there’s new stuff every, every day. And if you watch the news, they do. They want to keep going with it. Do they want to pause it? You know, so there’s new stuff every single day on I don’t know. I just found out this other one that does teach lesson plans for you, like specifically in that niche is creating teacher lesson plans, which is also wild. So you just kind to figure out which one works best.
You know, I really wish I would. That would have been around when I was going through all that. Yeah. So okay. So there are a lot of good things that come from and these types of platforms. Where are we going to see some problems?
Yeah, we are. You’re going to see cheating. I mean, it’s inevitable that kids are going to say, write me an argumentative essay on this or write me give me the answer to this. So as teachers, we’re going to have to combat that and you’re going to have to have discipline and consequences and you’re going to have to know your students and you’re going to have to rethink your assessments. My big thing is that Google tried to get us to do all of this however many years ago, and we didn’t do it. We just kept going. And students are using Google strategy as well. We’ve already seen evil or negative with the deepfakes. The videos that you can make yourself look like Tom Cruise or whoever you want to do.
That was the last example I saw so and we’ve already seen those negatives. We’ve seen I’m sure there’s image negatives out there. I’ve only seen funny ones, but like you had to learn how to combat it. Just like we have everything else. We can’t block the calculator, we can’t block Google. I mean, you probably can, but that’s not very beneficial. We just have to teach students how to use it correctly, effectively feature that it’s going to be wrong and it’s going to be very basic. It’s not going to have that word choice in there that we need. It’s not going to have your personalized station in there or your voice that usually comes across when you’re reading or writing.
The answers are going to be a year old. So until you know, they catch up with that, but it takes a while to teach it what we need it to know. We we’re just going to have to rethink and we’re going to have to prepare our students for a world with A.I., because it’s not going to go away. And so we got to teach them how to use it correctly and effectively.
So I had a question kind of relating to that with the negative side, is there already I don’t know if it’d be Chat GPT or another A.I. platform, but is there one that can check if a student just had an entire essay written by Chad GPT?
There is. There are A.I., plagiarism, checkers. I don’t know the name of it because our monitoring system does it. So we use blocksi and so blcoksi has one built into it. So our teachers can just kind of put it into blocksi and it tells it how much of it is a I created. I also know that Matt Miller just came out with a book about AI and at the end of every chapter he says in there what he used and how much of his chapter was written by a guy because he came out with this book about AI in ten days. And so his first criticism was like, Oh, you just use chapter two to write it all. So he proves that he did it. They solve this AI checker, so they’re out there. We just have one already built in, so I will use that one.
So how does it. No, that. So how does it know if something was actually written by AI or not? Because I assume if I. So if I’m writing a paper and you know, in history science, you know, if if you’re asked to write a paper, usually it’s not fiction or it’s not an opinion piece. It’s generally a report of some sort. So you’re going through authorized sources and scientific articles and everything to make sure that you’re getting correct information. If I’m pulling from ten or 15 different sources, isn’t that essentially what the AI is doing as well? And so is there a way of figuring out that this was written by a digital thing or it was written by a person? Or is it the information? I don’t understand how it would check.
Yeah, I think it has to do with like the coding that happens behind the thing of A.I., behind the platform. Again, I have no I.T. background, so I have no idea on how it actually, like, really, really works. I think my teacher answer to you would be that we have to focus on higher level docs, depth of knowledge questions and we have to focus on analyzing. We can’t just have students writing just word for word from research anymore, you know, we have to analyze those that evolution or those science standards. We have to analyze the theme or the article in English. We have to analyze social studies. And why is it important to do this so that we have to get our students past that copy-paste of research articles?
Because there’s no difference. There’s no difference for me, Google in an article about evolution, copy, paste it into my essay versus me asking GPT to essentially google it and find the answer for me so I cannot it answer your question of how does it know? But I think I know.
How to drive. But you’re not a mechanic, basically. Yep.
Very true. Yep. I can use it. Yeah, I just.
Understood.
And make it work.
So obviously we can figure out ways that students can use it incorrectly or not. I guess not incorrectly, but it just they can use it for cheating. I know, because I know, especially if you are teaching, let’s say three different, different classes throughout the day. I know at one point I had honors bio earth science and AP bio. It was not a great year. But that’s a lot. That’s a lot of lesson planning that goes into everything. And honestly, it took a long time. Or is there a way for an administrator or a teacher to use it? I guess that fine line of cheating way to help take back some time from from doing all of that that maybe you go okay GPA or whatever can do this please don’t.
I mean lesson planning like you said, I can say today I want to look at this standard and I can copy paste my standard in there or I can be creating an assessment and say, give me ten critical thinking questions about To Kill a mockingbird. And my quizzes made, which probably took you how however long as a teacher to create that quiz. Same thing with finding your text from the class. You might use your textbook, but if you want articles or if you want just any kind of authentic text, you can say, write me five paragraphs on the history of Ben and Jerry’s, and it’s going to pop it out in 30 seconds and you can copy, paste it and print it and go.
It can create all those rubrics for you that you may be using to grade. It can create all your grade book comments for you if you’re in a district that requires you to put your comment in for all 300 of your students, every grading period you can simply write me. Yeah, write me a grade book comment about ten different students and it’s not going to know the students it’s going to write you those grade book comments and you just copy-paste them in. It’s my favorite as it comes up with really great content jokes. So the high school English teacher, I had to be funny to have my students buy into me. And while I think I’m funny, they sometimes didn’t think I was funny. So I can be like, Give me some jokes about Shakespeare and it pops it out in 30 seconds and I’m funny for a month.
It’s great. So it’s going to help me with that by hand with my students. It’s going to write me all those recommendation letters. It can help me like summarize like complex passages for my lower readers. So if I have a passage that I want all my students to read, I can throw that in there and say, Make this level lower or so. And Lux, I’ll and it’s going to do that for me so that I don’t have to sift for a different text. And then all the students are looking at the same exact content, but at the reading level saves the day.
So is that something the administration or I guess okay, so we obviously can’t say every administration, but is that something that administrators generally seem to be okay with as far as where teachers are getting that material from or that the fact that they’re asking something else to make their lesson plans, I’m.
Okay with it. I mean, I’m not an I’m a curriculum integration specialist, but I don’t see it being a bad thing. I think it’s the same as Google for a lesson plan. I haven’t tried to ask it to give me like a specific curriculum provider lesson plan, so I’m not sure how that would go. But I think I don’t see anything wrong with it. I mean, I’m having it right. My recommendation letter is I’m having it write my it wrote like our, I think like our island parent letter home that we’re sending. Like we put that in there. It’s writing a school board policy. It’s right. I mean, it’s saves you so much time as an administrator as well. We got to teach teachers how to use it and then they get some time back to actually do what they’re supposed to be doing and working with students and differentiating, which you can also do, which is wild.
So along those lines of differentiation, you had mentioned that you also had a background in ESL, which was some numbering incorrectly as English as a second language. Do those platforms like can you ask GPT? Well, does it do any other language other than English?
I think so. I think it can. I’ve never tried it because as an ESL teacher, I want my students to be speaking and writing and learning in English. So I would use it the opposite way of having students talk to it to better their English, to improve their English, to improve their language skills, because that’s really what it is, right? It’s this language model or this generative I of language model. So I would have my ESL kids rather than using it in Spanish, which would be cool if it can do. I have no idea. I’ve never tried that. I want them to speak to it in English and then talk back to them.
I was just thinking along the lines of like, okay, so I understand this in my native language of Spanish, if I take it and copy and paste into chat GPT, will it be able to read Spanish and translate it over to English or something?
So I just asked it to translate whatever it just said to me about those seven books. And so it just changed it all in Spanish. So now I want to go tell all my ESL teachers about this and my ESL students that we have here.
Yeah, that’s pretty cool. Yeah. Wow, this is I swear, I just heard about TVT like two months ago, and I think now they’re on like the fifth version of it or something. But I have to assume some of this has been around for longer than the past few months, right? I mean, maybe we just didn’t know about it.
I think so. I think I think it’s been there and I know the people have been using it far longer than I have. I think it’s just finally hitting hit it in the media. Maybe. I also know that it is real quick to say that they’re limited rate. So I was in a meeting yesterday and they were trying to talk about it and nobody could get on because the free rate limit was exceeded. So eventually something’s going to go behind a paywall. A lot of it already has to get premium access. So, so, so we can’t rely on it. But I think it’s been around a while. I think they’ve been preparing us for it with other things like I mean, Google talking to Siri. Alexa Right. Like I think they have kind of been teasing us and getting us ready for something like this, but I think they kind of still blew all of our minds.
Yeah, I’ll have to. I’ll have to hop on and try to mess around with that a little bit. I don’t know, Mike, if you’ve tried any of those platforms at all, but it’s definitely piqued my interest.
I’ve used Chatbot to give me like LinkedIn prop prompts to use for like post ideas. That’s definitely been beneficial.
So I know our tech director has also used it to like, right, email use or like contracts. So the i.t technology realm is really cool too. Like I know we’re going to use it to build our knowledge base so that when teachers get on and ask questions or like put in internet IQ tickets, they are helped us tickets, they automatically get answers back. And so chat is going to help us build that because it takes a long time there.
Obviously, there’s a lot more that teachers and students can use it for than I thought of before this conversation started. But what how other? I know your backgrounds and curriculum, but how else do you see it being integrated into in the schools in general? I mean, outside of just asking it questions or asking it for prompts.
Yeah. So I mean, like Mike said as well, school of business is anybody can use it for social media marketing. It’s great with how do I market this and coming up with those great Instagram captions or just different ways you can ask it. What are ways to improve my social media interactions? And it’s going to come up with ways for you to try the same thing. If you’re like, Hey, I’m really stuck on how to schedule however many classes at once, it’s going to come up with problem solving. I think it’s a great way to just kind of think things through and get a baseline. I think our huge part was when we realized that it will again like write school board policies or write these massive contracts that we may need.
We kind of collaborated and we each asked for like a recommendation on growth mindset for an employee. And while it doesn’t know the employee, it gave us three different answers and we combine them. And now I have this really great paragraph or five paragraphs about this employee. So and a rather unique way that I’ve seen it used is to write an obituary for somebody. So like, yeah, right. Like it does anything. It does, it can work in the real world as well. It can write you your cover letter, it can write you I mean, it can write you an advertisement. It can it can save us all. Education, technology, real world. It’s going to save us all a bunch of time. But we always have to remember to put second I’s on it because it’s not going to be perfect.
I’ll say for sure. I know I recently just started up my own business and I’ve thought about trying it to maybe get some way marketing ideas and things like that. So definitely, probably something I’ll look into.
Yeah, it’s really neat.
Using it to write anyone’s obituary, any place. So this is kind of where it comes to me. I look at it and go, All right, so can it do it? Yes. Should it do it? I mean, is it ethical? Is it moral? Is it genuine? I mean, this is where, you know, that that debate’s been around forever with a lot of different things. But just because it can should we.
Write on certain things? I like that. It saves me time. It you know, when we did this recommendation for kind of like a celebration of excellence that we have here, it was not genuine, right? It doesn’t know the person. It just gave me generic sentences about growth mindset. But what would have taken me? How long to write those paragraphs? I can take the 5 minutes to put in direct examples and make it genuine. So it saved me and my colleagues 30 minutes or so to like collaborate on this paragraph, five paragraphs, etc. and we could just each kind of place in our genuine or genuine ity. So there are definitely places that we should not use it. But I do like that it saves me a lot of time and makes me sound really good, like it makes me sound a lot better than I would have brainstormed.
So I appreciate it. But I think the biggest reminder, and this is actually straight from chat when I was asking it a question about using it in the classroom, it says that it’s important that chat should only be used as a tool for support. It’s not going to be a replacement for a teacher or instruction or anything like that. It says like the teacher’s role is crucial in the learning process and we have to still be teachers and model and things like that. But JPT is just there to support us and I think that’s a huge, huge takeaway from it is that it notices that.
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that so it just reminded me of, you know, whether or not it’s genuine or disingenuous. I hear this argument a lot. I see on Facebook all the time, teachers or not teachers, but teacher pages posting about AI in chats and and how it’s ruining the paper writing process and this and that. Obviously, the teachers can use it to. But in my head it’s so does it does it show the student actually learned anything and wrote a paper about it? Probably not. They might have figured out some keywords and key topics, but they didn’t really probably get very much depth of knowledge going on there. Right. But then at the same time, I look at it and go, well, politicians don’t write their own speeches.
Most artists don’t write their own songs. So where do we have to draw this line of something else? Did it for me and I’m going to use it anyways and where that is and it’s not okay.
Yeah, I think it goes back to digital citizenship specifically and how we don’t teach that enough in schools. I think. I think as the world and society changes, we have to teach our students how to navigate it. So when is it okay and when is it not okay to use Google? When is it okay and not okay to use a calculator? You know, we can teach our students to use a calculator for 360 days, but those five days that we’re testing, we’re not allowed to use it. Like how? How does that going to work? Same thing here. We can use chat GPT when we’re at home. We can use Alexa when we’re at home for 8 hours or 12 hours however long.
But when you’re in the classroom, you can’t use it. So when is it okay? When is it not okay? When is it okay to run outside? When is it not okay to run outside? Like these are all decisions that we have to teach our students how to make. So it goes all the way back to like decision-making. It also goes back to.
How.
What is what does your classroom look like? Are you Google, are you chat table? Are you asking them to just regurgitate or are you developing that are going to succeed in the future, which is going to have AI? So how are we going to teach them to use it correctly, effectively.
Doesn’t scare you or does it excite you?
Oh, I’m excited, but that’s because I’m a teacher and I am. I like technology with that. I am 100% noticed and I know that I understand the scary. I understand if I were still in the classroom, I would be terrified. However, since I like technology, my students and I would be on it all the time like we would think it would be really cool. And we have teachers doing that. We have teachers modeling in their classroom how to use it. And then you go home and you’re like, Hey, did they teach you how to write your essay? And the student’s like, Nope, she didn’t teach me how to do that. She just taught me how to find the answer, like how to find the text or how to find the research.
So if we model it correctly, it’s going to be they’re going to have examples of how to use it. You also have to have to have the consequences if they use it incorrectly, they’ll learn. They learn everything. They learn to Google, they learn the calculator.
I learned the Dewey Decimal System in the library. So we are clearly way past that at this point. And then everything from so I remember back when I was in school, if you wanted to get through your, let’s say math homework really fast, you just looked in the back of the book, right? But they only had the odd numbers listed. And of course the teacher assigned the even one. So you can just copy those and then yeah, you know, you can to Google things when that was available and hopefully someone else asked the same question or your teacher took the question from online anyways. So the answer is already there, but now it just seems like all this information is just boom right there for you, which is really cool from a student standpoint and a teacher standpoint.
But now it’s almost like there is nothing they can’t answer or find the answer for. And like you said, it is about teaching how to use that in the right way. But I don’t think they’ll ever use Dewey Decimal Systems ever again.
No, I don’t think so either. A friend of mine said that we have this small window of opportunity to jump in with students, otherwise they’re going to jump in without us. And they’re either going to swim ahead or we’re going to have to save them. So we have to jump in with them right now to teach them how to navigate these waters of I, of chat, etc. So they’re going to learn how to work around it and we’re going to have to know our students well enough to, to know when it’s chat. You got to know your students. I mean, that’s number one. In the classroom, building relationships has to come before technology, it has to come before curriculum, it has to come before test taking that. You have to know those students so that you can prepare to help them succeed. It’s not going to know. Our students.
Know. But I mean, maybe you say like, hey, I’m going to describe this student to you. I don’t know how to I don’t know how it works. All right. So I mean, this is this has been enlightened and actually really interesting. I kind of like I’m kind of glad it wasn’t around when I was teaching, but I wish it was around when I was a student. So I guess in that order it would have still been around, but it would have been really cool to be able to use this in the classroom as well. I think obviously the students are, even as a teacher, trying to stay up on the newest technology that comes out, students are generally going to have their hands on it first.
It just seems like they’re somehow in the know before adults, and I don’t understand why, but you know, it’s cool. We’ll see what happens. Right. And then when bad things happen, hopefully there’s measurements to put in the place that stop those from happening and, you know, things don’t spiral out of control before, you know, you know, Skynet is taking over and Terminator is walking through the building or whatever. I don’t know who knows? But it is really cool to see where we’re going. And it’s happens very, very fast, which is cool. And again, scary.
Yeah, it came in quick and it might go out quick, it may lose its glitter. You never know. It may lose it shiny. And then we’re going to be right back to where we were. So we have to embrace the shiny, but we also have to be ready for it to go away or change or go behind a paywall. It’s all options. It’s all it’s all there. We don’t know what’s going to we don’t know what’s coming next.
Nope. Well, I do want to give you a second here for any plug. If you want to put it out there or tell everyone how great your school district is or your LinkedIn or anything like that. If you’re posting articles about technology and information or A.I. and whatever it is, people can find you. And I’ll give you the floor.
Yeah. So my resources, when I learned about this, it’s Twitter. I am just. Alison Slow, slow. So I retweet a lot of things there. Another place I am huge with the coast network, the consortium of school networks, and there are a bunch of articles they I just had a research report come out that is fantastic. They’re doing really good work. Indiana is just I will I mean, I’m going to plug Indiana as a whole because we’re doing really great things. Matt Miller’s book, he’s from Indiana. Our idea is fantastic with what they’re about to put out. And our S’s are great to our educational service centers. I mean, it’s great what Indiana, they let us risk. They all take risk and they let us fail and they help us along the way.
I just love it. I think it’s so fun to be able to try new things in the classroom. That’s why I like being able to take this perspective, of this teacher perspective, and I don’t have to take the cybersecurity, the tech director, and the privacy and all those boring things. We can just have fun in the classroom which AGP and someone else can tell us if we can’t or can’t use it, but it’s really beneficial. So I think we fight for the ability to use it and we teach our students how to use it correctly and we push the needle more towards authentic assessments and authentic project based learning and inquiry based learning, because that’s really what life looks like outside of school. So if we get school life to look like outside life, then we’re going to better prepare our students.
Well, Ali, thank you so much again for joining us today. Thank you, everyone, for listening. If anyone out there has any ideas or topics for our podcast or would like to be a guest, please let us know at our website. Is https://www.k12techrepairs.com/podcasts. If you have any suggestions or anything you want to hear about or if you want to be a guest on our podcast. Thank you, Ali, again, for joining us. And we will catch everyone. That’s them. Thank you very much.
In Episode 33, Hope Davis, MA, CHC takes us on a journey from personal challenges to leading educational innovation at Teach Tech U. Discover how her experiences fueled a passion for transformative technology in education, shaping the future with Project LEAR. An inspiring conversation for anyone intrigued by the power of tech to change lives. […]
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With guest speaker Marsha Maxwell, PhD, CETL, join us for a reflective journey on the advancements of AI through the years, focusing on how we can further develop these technologies to bridge educational divides.
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